“A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death.”
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John F. Kennedy
“The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the nation's greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable.”
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John F. Kennedy
“We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty”
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John F. Kennedy
“For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence -- on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match.”
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John F. Kennedy
“The ancient Greek definition of happiness was the full use of your powers along lines of excellence.”
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John F. Kennedy
“Those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside”
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John F. Kennedy
“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.”
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John F. Kennedy
“Not every child has an equal talent or an equal ability or equal motivation, but they should have the equal right to develop their talent and their ability and their motivation, to make something of themselves.”
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John F. Kennedy
“If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.
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John F. Kennedy
“When written in Chinese, the word "crisis" is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.”
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John F. Kennedy
“We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch - we are going back from whence we came.”
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John F. Kennedy
“Never before has man had such capacity to control his own environment,...We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history or the world - or make it the last.”
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John F. Kennedy
“For, in the final analysis, our most common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.”
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John F. Kennedy
“I can imagine no more rewarding a career. And any man who may be asked in this century what he did to make his life worthwhile, I think can respond with a good deal of pride and satisfaction: 'I served in the United States Navy.”
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John F. Kennedy
“Of course, it would be much easier if we could all continue to think in traditional political patterns—of liberalism and conservatism, as Republicans and Democrats, from the viewpoint of North and South, management and labor, business and consumer or some equally narrow framework. It would be more comfortable to continue to move and vote in platoons, joining whomever of our colleagues are equally enslaved by some current fashion, raging prejudice or popular movement. But today this nation cannot tolerate the luxury of such lazy political habits. Only the strength and progress and peaceful change that come from independent judgment and individual ideas—and even from the unorthodox and the eccentric—can enable us to surpass that foreign ideology that fears free thought more than it fears hydrogen bombs. We shall need compromises in the days ahead, to be sure. But these will be, or should be, compromises of issues, not of principles. We can compromise our political positions, but not ourselves.”
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John F. Kennedy
